Showing papers in "Style in 2011"

Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema

Abstract: Warren Buckland, Ed. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2009. ix + 241 pages. Warren Buckland's Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema is a well-timed study, examining a fascinating compilation of contemporary films that embrace non-classical storytelling techniques. The book contains a brief introduction by the editor and eleven concise essays written by various critics about an international collection of perplexing films including, Lost Highway, The Sixth Sense, Memento, Run Lola Run, Oldboy, and others. The book also serves as a fine compliment to special journal issues on the topic like CineAction 56 (2001) on shifting narratives and Film Criticism 31.1-2 (2006) on complex film narratives. The weakest aspect of what is an otherwise worthy book is the introduction. Buckland begins with a cultural generalization; arguing that since contemporary societies' "experiences have become opaque and complex" (1), so have our filmed narratives. But, he quickly moves away from such cultural analysis to present his true interests, examining new film narratives as they compare to Aristotle's rules for art in The Poetics and to either David Bordwell or Edward Branigan's formalist theories for film study, such as Bordwell's concept of "forking-path plots" (3). Bordwell and Branigan's narrative theories are influenced by the Russian formalists, yet Style readers may find it unusual that Buckland, in a book about puzzle plots that are "not just complex, but complicated and perplexing; [whose] events are not simply interwoven, but entangled" (3), has elided from his introductory overview most of the key narrative theorists such as: Eichenbaum, Bakhtin, Propp, Jakobson, Todorov, Levi-Strauss, Frye, Genette, Chatman, Prince, Rimmon-Kennan, Bal, or Ryan. Particularly surprising is that, after claiming a direct link between Aristotle and Bordwell, Buckland then drops the idea and begins to find limitations with Bordwell's theories, arguing: The premise of this volume is that the majority of forking-path/multiple draft/puzzle films are distinct in that they break the boundaries of the classical, unified mimetic plot. The puzzle film is made up of non-classical characters who perform non-classical actions and events. Puzzle film constitutes a post-classical mode of filmic representation and experience not delimited by mimesis. (5) Perhaps a simpler answer for Buckland could have been to reject Aristotle and Bordwell altogether as foundational critics and replace them with more postmodern critics like Eco, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Deleuze, or Zizek? The result is that this introduction may be skipped with no loss to the success of the remainder of the book. As with any collection of essays by diverse authors, the quality of each essay varies. Puzzle Films contains weaker, successful, and superior essays. The less successful essays are so because the authors try forcefully to fit either David Bordwell's or Edward Branigan's narrative theories into their general analyses of films, often leading to confusing rather than illuminating arguments. For example, Warren Buckland employs Bordwell to define the detective film when there are countless better definitions located elsewhere. He then makes claims that Lost Highway 's lead character Fred's "state of mind motivates the lack of synchronization between the narrative and narration" (5 1), which makes equal sense if one defines Lynch's film as an example of auteurist art cinema without even seeing the film as an experiment in narrative trickery. This essay also tries to wed Branigan's ideas about focalization to specific ways that dreams are used in the film. For example, Buckland states, "He [Fred] is therefore watching his pov [sic] shot within his dream now being manifest in reality via the video" (59). The result is a perplexing essay that does not make the film easier to understand. …

Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach

Abstract: Toolan, Michael. Narrative Progression in the Short Story: A Corpus Stylistic Approach. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009. ? + 212 pp. $ 149.00 Hardbound. This is an innovative and thought-provoking examination of the computationally discoverable stylistic elements of narrative progression in the modern short story. Chapter 1 explains that the study concentrates its attention on seven short stories: Joyce's 'Two Gallants"; Munro's "The Love of a Good Woman"; Mansfield's "Bliss"; Carver's "Boxes," "Cathedral," and "A Small, Good Thing"; and Updike's "A&P" Toolan analyzes these and other stories in attempts to uncover the narrative causes of "suspense, surprise, secrecy or gaps, mystery, tension, obscurity, and even incoherence" (1). It is an ambitious undertaking and where the study finds inconclusive evidence, Toolan is clear about the tentative nature of his expositions and methods and thus invites readers to expand or refine his methods and results. The book's methods are many and various: e.g., narrative reordering, reader-response questionnaires, and corpus analysis to be detailed in this review. Software includes Mike Scott's WordSmith Tools as well as Paul Rayson's Wmatrix and Gilbert Youmans's Vocabulary Management Profiles. Chapter 2 introduces the scholarship that provides the foundation on which Toolan's study builds: Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan's cohesion, the adjacency pairs of conversational analysis, John Sinclair's prospection and collocation, Michael Hoey's lexical priming, Bill Louw's semantic prosody. Toolan spends some time on the vexing but theoretically revealing problem of the choice of a "comparator corpus," a selection of texts that serves as the background or comparison for the foregrounded texts under analysis. The choices determine in part what will surface, for example, as keywords or even collocations or word clusters. Thus, Toolan points out that in one computational comparison the word says surfaced as a keyword only because the foregrounded text is in historic present while the twentieth-century background reference corpus naturally is not dense with narratives in the historic present (27). For much of the comparative work in his book, Toolan uses a comparator corpus of his own construction, consisting of 500,000 words of novel and short story fiction from authors such as Joyce, Hemingway, Updike, Bellow, Carver, and Beattie, just to name a few (28). What makes Toolan's book unusual is not its computational methods in general but instead the maximum spans that Toolan considers in stories, that is the entire story. Most collocational work or word cluster work analyzes connections discoverable five or fewer words on either side of the target word. Thus, as might collocate with i/as in "as if or cat might frequently occur within five words of the word dog. Toolan is interested in part not only in these short spans or links but also in links that occur across an entire story, for example repeated keywords across equally sized sections of a story. Chapter 3 examines in some detail Joyce's 'Two Gallants." Many empirical observations made in this chapter stand out for their inventiveness. For example, one often ignored pattern in corpus stylistics work is that characters' names surface as keywords, words with greater than expected frequency, when measured against a comparator corpus. Thus, Toolan notices that the two gallants' names - Corley and Lenehan - are keywords but that one is more key than the other, with Corley ahead of Lenehan, for the reason that Lenehan is the focalized character and is more frequently referred to than Corley with pronouns rather than with his name. Another consequence of the focalization of Lenehan is the occurrence of his name in the immediate vicinity of two other top keywords in the story - walked and eyes (33-34). Toolan next turns his attention to lexical diversity and the various methods, from the qualitative to the quantitative, to measure that diversity. …

Introduction. the Implied Author: Back from the Grave or Simply Dead Again?

Abstract: In 2001, Susan S. Lanser wrote, "few terms have stirred narratologists to so much vexation--and passion--as implied authorship" (153). This debate continues to rage and if anything has only grown more passionate, as the essays in this volume will attest. In the pages that follow, many definitions of the implied author will be quoted, proffered, defended, and attacked. (1) For the purposes of this introduction, we may begin with Wolf Schmid's recent statement: "The implied author refers to the author-image contained in a work and constituted by the stylistic, ideological, and aesthetic properties for which indexical signs can be found in the text" (161). Earlier definitions, stemming from the work of Wayne Booth and Seymour Chatman, further identify the implied author as an essential component of the communication structure of the text and/or as largely coterminous with the text itself. It is important to keep these logically distinct issues separate, since critiques of one position have no necessary implications for the others. Thus, one may readily grant that the implied author has no place in the communication model of the work and still have a solid argument for the figure as an author-image constructed by the text. Other issues that are frequently associated with this subject include the relation between the implied author and the implied reader, the status of intentionality, the relevance of contextual information outside of the text, and the locus of a work's meaning. Most new concepts in narrative theory either wind up gradually incorporated or quietly ignored; the debate over the implied author, however, has become rather entrenched. Many arguments against some of the more extreme theoretical formulations continue to be set forth, and many of the earlier statements in support of the figure are revised, clarified, and reformulated. In addition to providing the latest statements on this debate by both sides, this volume also includes two important features: new work extending the concept into previously underexplored areas, such as nonfictional narrative and multiple implied authors, and producing a number of readings of specific texts that try to show the precise difference the concept makes or fails to make. Another important contribution of these essays is the incorporation of a number of concepts from analytical philosophy. With the partial exception of Lanser, the contributors to this volume all line up decisively on one side or the other of this dispute. The issue begins with Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck's bracing, wide-ranging, and spirited polemic against the concept of the implied author, playfully couched in pseudo-theological language. It is followed by Marie-Laure Ryan's equally resolute critique of existing formulations and defenses of the position. Taking ideas of meaning and intention from recent analytical philosophy of language, she argues that both terms, meaning and intention, can be adequately described in the philosophical framework and that there is no need to go beyond it to account for actual and imperfect acts of communication in literary texts. Maria Stefanescu explores Levinas-based and rhetorical-narratological accounts of the implied author and tests them against two critical readings of Yann Martel's Life of Pi. She finds both theoretical approaches inadequate to justify the concept; accordingly, Stefanescu offers an alternative understanding of intentionality. Finally, Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller, the authors of the only book-length study of the implied author, summarize their most stringent critiques even as they acknowledge that the concept is doubtless here to stay. The next part of the volume takes up the defense of the implied author and extends its application. Dan Shen identifies significant misinterpretations of Booth's formulations and offers a powerful new defense of the implied author. Peter Rabinowitz next argues for the concept by pointing to its fundamental constructedness--his implied author describes the way authors choose to present themselves in their texts. …

Social Minds in Fiction and Criticism

Abstract: It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. --Oscar Wilde In Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, the villain, Blandois, arrives one evening at a French inn. As he walks in, the narrator remarks, "there had been that momentary interruption of the talk about the stove, and that temporary inattention to and distraction from one another, which is usually inseparable in such a company from the arrival of a stranger" (167-68). Later in the same novel, Mr. Meagles admits to Arthur Clennam, "we do, in families, magnify our troubles and make mountains of our molehills in a way that is calculated to be rather trying to people who look on--to mere outsiders" (370). Mr. Meagles also explains, "there is one of those odd impressions in my house, which do mysteriously get into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have picked up in a distinct form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems to have got hold of loosely from somebody and let go again, that she [Miss Wade] lives, or was living [near Park Lane]" (373). These three statements are examples of the workings of social minds in the novel. They become visible through an externalist perspective on narrative fiction. Specifically, they describe intermental thought, which is joint, group, shared, or collective thought, as opposed to intramental, or private, individual thought. (Some theoretical background on these concepts is given in a later section of this essay.) The minds of the group of people in the inn share a sense of intrusion. And, as the narrator points out, this shared sense of discomfort at the arrival of a stranger is common in such situations. Mr. Meagles makes a general point about how families typically behave (making mountains out of molehills) that is also true of his family. Mr. Meagles, again, describes the intermental functioning of his family (a shared knowledge of Miss Wade's whereabouts but with no knowledge of how this information was acquired) and points out that this sort of thought is typical of families. In all three cases, minds are working in the same way, and the thought being described here is, to some extent, collective. There is one important difference between the remark about the French inn and the two statements about the Meagles family. The first is a description of a social mind by a heterodiegetic (or third-person) narrator. The other, a claim by an individual character, Mr. Meagles, about the group mind of which he is a part. The relationship between intra- and intermental activity, between social minds and individual minds, between the internalist and the externalist perspectives, is a complex and fascinating one. It is central to narrative fiction, and it is the subject of this essay. My purpose is to put statements such as those discussed above at the heart of narrative theory. Fictional social minds are not of marginal interest; they are central to our understanding of fictional storyworlds. This is because real social minds are central to our understanding of, and ability to operate in, the actual world. My thesis is that social minds are possible because much of our thought is visible, which is why Oscar Wilde said that "it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances" and that "the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." It is a cliche of literary studies that, whereas novels can give us direct access to the minds of characters, by contrast, in reality, we can never really know what other people are thinking. This is the sort of thing that sounds true while it is being said within that context, but, in other contexts, can sound like complete nonsense. To believe it requires a considerable degree of cognitive dissonance in order to contradict the weight of evidence of our everyday experience. All of us, every day, know for a lot of the time what other people are thinking. This is especially true of our loved ones, close friends, family, and work colleagues. …

The Implied Author, Deficient Narration, and Nonfiction Narrative: Or, What's Off-Kilter in the Year of Magical Thinking and the Diving Bell and the Butterfly?

Abstract: For the most part, the participants in the debate about the concept of the implied author have focused on fiction (see Booth, Genette, Chatman, Rimmon-Kenan, Lanser, Hansen, Nunning, Kindt and Muller, Richardson, Shen, and Phelan), while some participants in the closely-related debate about unreliable narration have turned to nonfiction (see especially Shen and Xu and Phelan, Living) But to my knowledge, no one has yet done what I shall attempt to do here: use nonfiction narrative as the central focus of a discussion that brings together the debates about the implied author and about unreliable narration More specifically, I shall focus on two instances of what I will call "off-kilter" narration - narration that most attentive readers find themselves unable to take at face value - in recent, justly celebrated memoirs, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, as I also advance two interrelated positions: (1) the concept of the implied author deserves an important place in our understanding of narrative communication in both fiction and nonfiction; (2) that understanding can be enhanced if we distinguish between narration that is intentionally off -kilter, which I will call unreliable, and narration that is unintentionally off -kilter, which I will call deficient Furthermore, I will contend that the passages in the memoirs by Didion and Bauby are examples of deficient rather than unreliable narration, and that both the concept of the implied author and the nonfictional status of the narratives help us recognize them as such But first I need to make the case for the utility of the concept of the implied author, a concept I define as a version of the actual author - or, in cases of hoaxes or other deceptions such as fraudulent memoirs, the purported author - and the agent responsible for the multiple choices that make the text the way it is and not some other way Elbow Room for the Intentionality of the Implied Author I start with a small debate I have been having with two leading theorists of lifewriting, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson In Living to Tell about It, I argue that the first edition of Smith and Watson's impressive book Reading Autobiography (2001) offers a helpful analysis of four autobiographical "Fs" (the historical-I of the real author, the narrating-I, the narrated-I, and the ideological-I) but that the analysis leaves an unfortunate gap between the real author and the narrating-I Since Smith and Watson contend both that the real author is ultimately unknowable and that the narrating-I may have multiple voices, I suggest that their model should fill the gap with the implied authorial-I This implied authorial-I would be the agent responsible for choosing which of the multiple voices of the narrating-I to employ at which points in the narration This implied authorial-I would also be able to communicate whether the narrating-I was a reliable or unreliable spokesperson In the recently-released, and even more impressive, second edition of Reading Autobiography, Smith and Watson respond to my suggestion by politely rejecting it They contend that the "narrating and narrated 'Fs are too temporally interlinked to both be the effects of an implied author, and the project of self -narration is too involved with its own process of reading or interpretation to sustain, or require, this third term" (76) As long as the model of autobiographical telling emphasizes that both the narrating-I and the narrated-I are potentially mobile, the concept of the implied author is unnecessary: "Phelan's model of positing a triangular situation (with narrating ?,' narrated ?,' and implied author) seems to depend on a narrating T fixed in one temporal plane We would argue that the dynamism of much autobiographical work, its ability to put the narrative situation into play, makes such a category redundant" (76) From my perspective, what Smith and Watson's response demonstrates most powerfully is something that any advocate for the concept of the implied author ought to be aware of: among many narrative theorists, resistance to the concept runs deep …

Meaning, Intent, and the Implied Author

Abstract: My interest in the implied author (henceforth 1A) dates back to a discussion on the Narrative listserv a few years ago. I have forgotten what started the thread, but I remember that it concerned how the IA of a certain text should be constructed and that all the participants seemed to take the theoretical importance of this notion for granted. Narrative fiction, all seemed to agree, was the product of a six-participant transaction involving an author, an implied author, a narrator, a narratee, an implied reader, and a real reader, though the outermost two participants were considered of no concern for literary criticism. In my earlier work, I had dutifully appended the term "implied" to any mention of the author, partly because Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction had succeeded in convincing me of the necessity of the IA, and partly for fear of appearing theoretically unsophisticated. But now I could no longer see the justification for building the protective wall of the IA between the reader and the real author, so I butted into the discussion with a post stating my skepticism regarding the existence of this sacred cow of literary criticism. It was as if l had screamed, "God is dead," in the middle of a church service. The participants in the thread responded with a volley of posts explaining why flesh-and-blood authors must be left out at all costs from literary interpretation, and why they must be replaced by IAs if the text is to be regarded not only as the representation of individual events occurring in a fictional world (a representation which is the job of the narrator), but also as the expression of general ideas, values, and opinions whose domain of applicability extends to the real world. The main argument for attributing these ideas, values, and opinions to an IA rather than to the real author (henceforth RA) is that there is no way to tell whether RA sincerely endorses them or lives by these standards. Many cases were presented of authors being despicable in real life but admirable in their incarnations as IAs, though nobody could come up with an example of the opposite situation. Some contributors went as far as suggesting the purely hypothetical case of an author defending in a novel the exact opposite of what he believes in, not just through individuated characters, but as the global message of the text. (Why an author would want to do this remained, however, obscure: it seems a sure recipe for spreading the wrong ideas!) I thought at the time that I was the only IA-doubter in the narratological community and that my arguments were consequently original. But as I started doing research for this article, I made the partly annoying, partly reassuring discovery that the concept of IA has a long history of being under fire. Its critics include narratologists as prominent as Gerard Genette, Mieke Bal, Ansgar Nunning, Michael Toolan, Nilli Diengott, Tom Kindt, and Hans-Harald Muller, all of whom, it should be noted, come from beyond the Atlantic. The proponents of the IA, by contrast, are mainly Americans: Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, James Phelan, Peter Rabinowitz, William Nelles, and Brian Richardson. The implied author wars, then, pit American narratology against the rest of the world. (See Phelan 2005 and Schmid 2009 for useful accounts of the IA controversy.)As l read through the pro- and anti IA literature, I soon discovered that the term "implied author" was like William Gibson's concept of cyberspace: "Slick and hollow--awaiting received meaning" (27)--and that the only thing that unites all the users of the term is just that: the use of the term. Every advocate of the IA seemed to have his own conception of what IAs stand for, and every opponent seemed to have different objections. As the readers of this essay know full well, the concept of IA was first proposed by Wayne Booth in 1961 as a reaction against the rigid "textualism" of New Criticism. In the textualist position, the words on the page are the sole legitimate source of meaning, and any appeal to the author's intention (otto external documents that may explain the text) is considered heretical. …

Deixis and fictional minds

Abstract: In this essay I show how marked patterns in the use of deictic expressions in literary texts can contribute to the projection of fictional minds that appear to work in “nonstandard” or “unorthodox” ways. More specifically, I suggest that the inherent “egocentricity” of deictic expressions can be exploited to represent strikingly “egocentric” fictional minds. I discuss in detail two examples from different genres: the poetic persona in Ted Hughes’s poem “Wodwo”, and the first-person narrator in Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In each case, I point out the presence of patterns in the use of deictic expressions that can be described as idiosyncratic, and I argue that these patterns interact with other textual phenomena to contribute to the impression of a fictional mind that works in a striking and distinctive way. My claims about the idiosyncratic use of certain types of deictic expressions in the two texts are supported by automatic quantitative comparisons with relevant larger corpora.

The Implied Author: A Secular Excommunication

Abstract: As Susan Lanser rightly points out, the implied author (Booth, Rhetoric) exists only "as inferred and imagined"; it "is essentially a matter of belief, existing only when and where readers construct it" (Lanser 154). Though believers say they construct the implied author on the basis t the effect on the reader is mistaken for the origins of the story). (2) In the second part, we juxtapose Booth's "spiritual" tradition with two more down-to-earth angles on author images--the empirical approach proposed by Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon, and the Bourdieu-inspired discourse analysis in the work of Jerome Meizoz, Dominique Maingueneau and Ruth Amossy. Our alternative to the implied author is a dynamic author image that is not at the root of the text, but originates in a process of negotiation between reader, text, context, and the author's self-presentation. The crucial role in this process is for the reader, but this role is not at the root of the process either. In the third part, we illustrate our alternative with reference to Thomas Pynchon. We show how readers construct his elusive author image, and how Pynchon and his editor develop reader images. In both cases, text and context play an important part, but the four elements of the constructive process (author's self-presentation, reader, text, context) are interdependent. In this complex and never-ending process of negotiation, there is neither an absolute starting point+ nor a God-like creator. 1. The Implied Author as Our Lord and Savior One: God = Invisible and Omnipresent In spite of His or Her invisibility, God is supposed to be everywhere, just like the implied author is supposed to pervade the text and, in some cases, even the entire literary production of any literary author. (3) The power of the concept is actually based on a weakness, namely on the impossibility to locate and trace it in the actual text. The implied author is said to hover over the textual world, very much like a God who hovers over our actual world. The implied author does not have a voice but invents all voices telling the story (Chatman 85). …

What Is the Implied Author

Abstract: The "implied author" (IA) as first proposed by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) has become "a household word" in the critical discourse on narrative fiction (Nunning, "Implied Author" 239). Due to the lack of agreement about what the term actually designates, it has aroused heated critical debate (for recent summaries, see Phelan 38-49; Kindt and Muller 63-121; Richardson 114--33; Nanning "Reconceptulizing" 91-97; Booth "Resurrection"; Shen "Booth's" 171-76; Schmid; Shaw). The debate "shows no signs of letting up," and some theorists predict that still more discussion is very much in order (Richardson 115; see also Nunning "Implied Author" 240). Summarizing the debate in the Routledge encyclopedic entry "Implied Author," Ansgar Nunning says, "Most objections raised against the implied author concern potential theoretical contradictions in Booth's formulation of the concept. For example, it seems to be a contradiction in terms to define the implied author as the structure of the text's norms and thus to conflate it with the text as a whole, and at the same time cast it in the role of the addresser in the communication model of narrative." ("Implied Author" 240) Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Muller also see contradiction or inconsistency in Booth's own formulation of the concept which "leaves open the question of whether the implied author is (1) an intentional product of the author in or qua the work or (2) an inference made by the recipient about the author on the basis of the work" (7--8). They assert that a "sensible" explication of the implied author "must not try to explicate the concept as the contradictory whole that it is, but should seek instead to elucidate its individual components separately from one another in order to identify what, if any, possible explications for them emerge" (12, see also 151-82). But if we examine Booth's own words carefully, we'll find that Booth's own formulation is quite logical and coherent, basically free from the theoretical contradictions alleged by many commentators. Such contradictions are primarily attributable to other critics' misinterpretation of an expression Booth quite consistently used, though in varied forms, namely, the real author's "creating" the implied author. Revealing the essential meaning of this key expression in its varied forms is a crucial step in getting at the true referent of the "implied author." In what follows, I'll first explore what the "implied author" actually refers to and reveal the major reasons underlying previous misunderstandings of the concept. Then I'll discuss the relevance and significance of the concept in today's critical context. The True Referent of "Implied Author" To grasp the essence of the implied author, we have to find out, first of all, what the term "create" means in Booth's claim that the novelist creates the implied author as he writes the text: To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes "only by writing the story that the novelist can discover--not his story--but its writer, the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative." ... it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author's most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner.... his di f ferent works will imply different versions, different ideal combinations of norms. Just as one's personal letters imply different versions of oneself depending on the differing relationships with each correspondent and the purpose of each letter, so the writer sets himself out with a different air depending on the needs of particular works. (Rhetoric 71; my emphasis) Despite various unwitting 'mystifications' of the "implied author" by later critics, as far as the encoding process is concerned, the "implied author" in Booth's own formulation is no other than "the writer [who] sets himself out with a different air" or the person "who writes in this manner. …

Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric

Abstract: Paul Butler Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric Logan: Utah State UP, 2008 181 pages Paul Butler introduces Out of Style by announcing multiple, interrelated goals As Butler surveys research and pedagogies of style from approximately the last half century of composition theory and practice, he offers a credible revisionist history of the current state of stylistic study in rhetoric and composition with the particular goal of refraining style as an integral part of the process movement His revised history suggests that style is "ubiquitous, having diffused into other areas of the discipline under different names and ideas" (22) Butler then pulls his revisionist history of style into a more urgent arena, public intellectualism Butler addresses the need for composition to begin public discussions of writing and style as social in nature Doing so would help change the public's perception of writing as primarily an issue of grammar and correctness and introduce the tenets of rhetoric and composition theory to the public's working knowledge of writing and writing pedagogy Before he begins his exploration of style in modern composition theory, Butler delves into classical rhetoric in his opening chapter to "analyze how rhetors conceived of style through history and deployed its resources according to fundamental differences in beliefs about the appropriate function of language in culture" (26) The reworking of Plato, The Sophists, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, and Ramus slowly merges Butler's history of cultural change into modern composition's study of style Emerging are the "long standing debates" still omnipresent today Respectively, they are a debate over the separation of form and content, a debate over style as either conscious or unconscious choice, and a debate about style as representative of the individual only The critique of these limiting lenses, repeated throughout rhetorical history, culminates in two major points that build Butler's definition of style One, most theories wish to connect style specifically to one rhetorical canon and therefore restrict the study of style Two, Butler's definition is best understood as embedded in Todorov's own definition of style, which suggests that "style is relevant when related to a larger element in the text" (49), such as thematic motif, so that both thematics and stylistics are signifier and signified of each other Butler suggests early on a new definition of style as "the deployment of rhetorical resources, in written discourse, to create and express meaning Style involves the use of written language features as habitual patterns, rhetorical positions, and conscious choices at the sentence and word level, even though the effects of these features extend to broader areas of discourse and beyond" (3) In Butler's definition we see both the strength and weakness of his book Although Butler often alludes to effects of style, he offers little commentary on reading or audience reception, and his research does not include any of the variety of fields - from reader response to cognitive linguistics to qualitative and quantitative studies of textual effect - that would move his investigation of style beyond writer/speaker or text This is not a criticism of Butler's bookper se, but merely a note on the conversation in which Out of Style participates Readers seeking connections, even theoretical, between style and theories of mind will find Out of Style adding little to research conversations about rhetorical effect Butler focuses on "the productive and inventive uses of style" (21) and accounts for discourse analysis and literary criticism to medium degree, but the concepts and theorists from other disciplines are those that are well known and often used in rhetoric and composition Butler offers little new interdisciplinary work or integration of current advances in other language-interested disciplines …

Style Brings in Mental States1

Abstract: I Much of what I write these days is an elaboration of Alan Palmer's argument that "novel reading is mind-reading." Here, too, I take up one aspect of that argument and consider it in light of my recent experience of studying fiction in a lab with fMRI equipment. (Well, not really - we are actually very far from approaching actual works of literature with brain imaging technology - but as close as I have come to doing so.) As Palmer observes in his target essay for this volume, to claim that we understand the actions of fictional characters by uncovering "the mental network" behind them, is not to flatten out the undeniable differences between novels, or to make impossible any worthwhile distinctions between them. To say that the reader can only follow the actions of the characters in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) by following the thought processes behind those actions is certainly not to say that it is the same sort of novel as James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Of course the two are different. And again, later in the essay, [An] understanding of characters' thought processes is as necessary for Tom Jones as it is for Ulysses. I cannot find any way of retreating from the universality of my claim. Equally, I do not see any way in which this claim is a refusal to acknowledge the astonishing and endless variety of narrative. To say so would be like suggesting that I am trying to flatten out fictional variation by pointing out that Ulysses and Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code use exactly the same 26 letters of the alphabet! Palmer identifies here what constitutes both a problem and a "major cultural studies research project." If fiction is all about mind-reading, then the burden is on us (i.e., on cognitive literary critics) to explain why reading Ulysses feels so strikingly different from reading Tom Jones (not to mention The Da Vinci Code I). What goes into the construction of this difference? To what extent is it intrinsic to the text, and to what extent is it a reflection of the values of a particular historical period, or of an individual reader's perspective? Palmer begins to address such questions by pointing out that, "Fielding gives us much less of the workings of characters' minds than does Joyce, and so events are more central to the plot of the former's novel and thoughts more central to the plot of the latter's."2 He further observes that there seems to be significant variation in the way writers belonging to different historical periods construct "social minds" in the novel, a reflection, perhaps, "of the relationship between narrative technique and cultural conceptions of the self." In what follows, I, too, argue that, far from "flattening out the fictional variation," research in theory of mind may actually shed a surprising new light on how we construct such variation. Specifically, by becoming consciously aware of the "mental network" behind characters' actions, we may gain a new appreciation of what constitutes an individual writing style. II Style brings in mental states. That's what I learned last summer, though my actual phrasing at the time reflected frustration rather than the joy of discovery: style drags in mental states. As part of a research team, comprising literary scholars and cognitive neuroscientists, studying theory of mind with fMRI, I was in charge of putting together a series of narrative vignettes containing different levels of what we called "mental embedment." To briefly illustrate our principle of counting levels of mental embedment, consider the following four examples: The sentence, "My last name begins with a Z, while Alan's last name begins with a P," contains no mental states, hence zero embedment. "I don't want to read The Da Vinci Code" contains one mental state, that of not wanting to read the book, hence one embedment. "I used to think that I would hate The Da Vinci Code" contains two embedded mental states: thinking about hating the book. …

Neo-Aristotelian Rhetorical Narrative Study: Need for Integrating Style, Context and Intertext

Abstract: Along with the "narrative turn" in the past several decades, the critical field has been marked by the thriving development of narrative theory and criticism Of the numerous approaches to fictional narrative, the rhetorical (since the 1960s), the feminist (since the 1980s), and the cognitive (since the 1990s) have been the most influential In terms of the rhetorical approach which has been shedding significant light on the relation among the implied author, narrator, character, and audience, Wayne C Booth (1921-2005) and James Phelan (1951-) have successively figured as leaders of its two stages of development, first from the 1960s to the 1980s, and then from the 1990s up to the present Booth and Phelan are respectively representatives of the second and third generations of the neo-Aristotelian Chicago School of criticism Although the latter generations of the neo-Aristotelians differ from the first in significant ways, such as moving from the concern primarily with the poetic (the text) to a concern with the rhetorical (author-audience communication) or with the rhetorical-poetic (Phelan, Experiencing 79-94), in some important aspects they bear the imprint of the first generation as represented by R S Crane (1886-1967) The early neo-Aristotelians, on one hand, marked off their approach from other branches of criticism and, on the other, advocated pluralism or the coexistence of different approaches The disciplinary boundary has enabled the Chicago School to take on its own characteristics and contribute to the study of literature in its unique ways But the boundary has also brought certain limitations There are two self-imposed preclusions that have very much persisted up to the present in the rhetorical study of fictional narrative: first, the preclusion of style or language, and second, the preclusion of the context of creation This essay argues that, in order to get closer to the implied author's norms and better account for the relation among author, narrator, character and audience, it is necessary to integrate style, context of creation, and intertextual comparison into rhetorical criticism Inclusion instead of Exclusion of Style Continuous Exclusion of Style or Language The first generation of Chicago critics followed Aristotle in subordinating literary language to the larger structure of the work in a given genre Indeed, neglecting style or language enabled them to focus on the "architecture" of literary works, or more specifically, to concentrate on "how fully a given poem exemplifies the common structural principles of the genre to which it has been assigned" (Crane, "Introduction" 1-2) Moreover, the early Chicago critics engaged in a fierce polemic against New Critics whose exclusive concern with language and irony they found excessively limiting (see Phelan, Experiencing 79-87) The antagonism of the Chicago School towards the language-oriented New Criticism added to the preclusion of style This tendency was inherited by contemporary rhetorical critics In the afterword to the second edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction (1983), Booth very much insists on his underplaying language or style in the first edition because of "the non-verbal basis of fictional effects" (461) To him, the earlier Chicago critics' development of Aristotle's method provides "the most helpful, least limiting view of character and event--those tough realities that have never submitted happily to merely verbal analysis" (460) He subscribes to Joseph E Baker's view that the "aesthetic surface" of fiction is found, not in words, but in the "world" of character, event, and value "concretely represented and temporally arranged" (Baker 100, qtd in Booth 480) The preclusion of language is reinforced through rhetorical critics' drawing on structuralist narratology Many rhetorical critics today have adopted the narratological distinction between story and discourse (see Shen "Story-Discourse," "Defense") …

John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought

Abstract: Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008, 488 pp. This excellent biography will be the standard Life of Milton for decades to come, so it is especially important to take due note of its weaknesses as well as its many great strengths. The authors inform us that their "account of the factual record is the first since Masson's to have been based on an inspection of all the available documents," (2) and the array of archival evidence is indeed impressive. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought has both the advantages and disadvantages of historicist criticism. Its advantage is that it offers unrivaled insight into the political complexities of Milton's time; its disadvantage is that these triumphs are sometimes won at the expense of a perfunctory treatment of the poems (especially "Lycidas" and Paradise Lost). The very title of the chapter "Plague, Fire, and Paradise Lost" reveals a set of priorities that would have surprised earlier biographers. Even Christopher Hill (whose whole purpose was to root Milton in his historical and political context) devoted 100 pages of his 1977 biography to "The Great Poems," and his chapter entitled "Paradise Lost" hesitantly ventured "the historical context" as the title of but one of seven subsections. It is a sign of how far context has prevailed over text in the three decades since Hill's book appeared that the title of Milton's most celebrated poem can now be appended as an afterthought. But it would be churlish to be ungrateful for the many riches that Campbell and Corns do offer. They are fascinating on plague and fire and much else besides, and it is appropriate for a literary biography to prioritize people and events over poems. It is possible, nevertheless, to take a good approach too far. Excessive contextualizing can become reductive, especially when applied to a great poem like Paradise Lost which is too capacious to be contained by any one context. There are a few (a very few) places where Campbell and Corns are reductive. One of the most discussed and controversial episodes in Paradise Lost occurs when God tells the angels that they will henceforth be ruled by his Son, a mysterious figure who supposedly created them, but whose own existence was a secret until God exalted him over his surprised subjects. Campbell and Corns suggest that this episode might contain some memory of the charged moment in English history when the dying Oliver Cromwell exhorted "civilian republicans and senior officers in the New Model Army" to recognize the succession of his son Richard, "a figure hitherto virtually unknown." Campbell and Corns know better than to argue for a topical allusion. They make the more modest claim that this episode reveals "an awareness of how the political animal, in its hopes, fears, and longings, behaves" (345). This is fascinating, and it offers a possible answer to the many critics who have objected to what they see as Milton's political naivete. But it matters that God the Father is not on his deathbed, and it matters that he exalts his Son as King of kings, not a Lord Protector of a fledgling republic. I, for one, am not persuaded that Milton intended (consciously or otherwise) even the remotest parallel between the Son of God and Richard Cromwell, but Campbell and Corns are not critics to be dismissed lightly and readers should judge for themselves. If, in this instance, Campbell and Corns diminish the Son (a parallel with Richard Cromwell brings him down through infinite descents), elsewhere in the same chapter they overstate his powers when they assert that Milton "carefully establishes" that Father and Son "both share the characteristic of omniscience" (338) . This statement surprised me, since Milton, in the fifth chapter of De Doctrina Christiana, emphatically denies that the Son shares the Father's divinity, including (and especially) the divine powers of omniscience and omnipotence. Campbell and Corns are, of course, aware of Milton's unorthodox views. …

Post-Cartesian Approaches to Narrative and Mind: A Response to Alan Palmer's Target Essay on "Social Minds"

Abstract: Like all of his work, Alan Palmer's target essay on "Social Minds" is remarkable for its clarity, scope, and suggestiveness. Indeed, in reading this essay I was reminded of the time I first encountered, some eight years ago. Palmer's groundbreaking article on "The Construction of Fictional Minds." Offering an impressive synthesis and critique of previous research on the minds of fictional characters, and written in a lucid, accessible style that in no way over-simplifies the issues involved, the essay outlined an entire program for research--an interdisciplinary, field-extending approach to fictional minds that brings the study of literary narrative into closer dialogue with fields ranging from cognitive and social psychology to philosophy and discourse analysis. Now, in his target essay for this special issue, Palmer further refines that research program by separating out from his initial concern with the construction of fictional minds in general the sub-problem of how narrative texts present--and readers engage with--social minds in particular, defined here as joint or collective minds that are constituted by dyads as well as larger groups. Narrowing Palmer's earlier focus on how readers use textual cues to ascribe beliefs, intentions, motivations, and emotions to all sons of fictional characters, the target essay, like the book-length study from which it derives, hones in on what Palmer terms intermental thought, or mental processes that span more than one person and that can be contrasted with intramental or "private, individual thought." To explore how intermental processes play out in novels, especially the nineteenth-century British novel, Palmer once again draws productively on work from a range of disciplines. In doing so, he not only develops new models for narrative study but also attends to phenomena neglected by previous scholars of story, such as the use of passive constructions and of presupposition to signal the views of collective intelligences like "the Middlemarch mind." In short, by underscoring the relevance of the minds of groups, Palmer's target essay also foregrounds issues that are foundational for the study of (fictional) narratives. In the present response, I seek to map out some additional routes for exploring these foundational issues. Specifically, in order to re-examine the concept of "social minds" as it is deployed in Palmer's essay, I focus on what Palmer describes as "the complex and fascinating" relationship "between intra-and intermental activity, between social minds and individual minds, between the internalist and externalist perspectives." To suggest why it is important to disentangle these distinctions and sort out the issues bound up with them, I concentrate on just a couple of moments in Palmer's rich discussion: one in which he draws on the idea of "theory of mind," and another in which he contrasts Henry Fielding's and James Joyce's techniques for representing consciousness. I wish to stress up front, however, that I offer these remarks not in a spirit of nitpicking but rather in an attempt to further the larger project to which Palmer's essay contributes so invaluably: investigating the nexus of narrative and mind. As I see it, the three distinctions at issue--social/individual, intermental/ intramental, externalist/internalist--are cross-cutting rather than coordinate or parallel, meaning that one could develop an externalist account of single minds or conversely an internalist account of processes of social cognition, for example. Thus, work by Andy Clark, whom Palmer mentions in his essay, can be used to buttress an externalist approach to (aspects of) particular minds, as when Clark discusses how physical artifacts such as iPhones, cultural technologies such as written language, and other external resources support basic cognitive processes in individuals as well as groups. By the same token, one could follow Vygotsky in studying the social basis of intramental processes, investigating the way skills and dispositions learned via guided participation in activities supervised by more expert peers are internalized by children over the course of their ontogenetic development. …

The Implied Author: An Agnostic Manifesto

Abstract: For the past few years, I've wandered around narrative conferences muttering. "Please, not another talk about the implied author," "Can't we banish arguments about the implied author from the conference? .... How about a moratorium on the term 'implied author' for next year?" Those cranky comments were calling not for the erasure of a term but for the admission of a stalemate: I believed that the longstanding debates about the implied author had reached a point of diminishing returns. I am hoping that the current issue of Style will prove me wrong. Meanwhile, hoisted with my own petard to participate in a conversation I'd proclaimed we should banish, I offer a set of propositions about the non-entity that continues to haunt narratological discourse. That I adopt a quasi-theological language is a conscious choice that attempts to render the spirit of this prolonged inquiry. Let me clarify that I don't consider the issue of implied authorship unimportant, just stuck. The manifesto I offer here is an effort to articulate a set of principles that might lead if not to consensus, then to a shift in our approach, a move neither away from nor toward the implied author but toward a different critical practice that might tell us whether--and, if so, how--divergent understandings of implied authorship affect the poetic-hermeneutic enterprise. My propositions are agnostic not only because I myself remain so with respect to the concept of the implied author, but because I hope they will speak to theorists on both sides of the 1A divide. As steps toward praxis, these premises build on one another and are thus best read in sequence. 1. The implied author is not an empirical entity. It is neither an identifiable textual voice nor a demonstrable material being. It therefore has no place in a model of communication. Nearly all literary scholars agree that the implied author is neither the historical ("flesh-and-blood") author of a text. nor a narrator, nor any other textually identifiable persona. But we do not always act in keeping with this axiom. Even though Seymour Chatman, for instance, argues that the implied author"has no voice" (41), he famously includes the implied author as a figure in his chain of communication. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan criticized this inclusion almost immediately (89), and there has been no successful refutation of her position, yet Chatman's model continues to be evoked even by narrative theorists who disagree with it, which perpetuates its visual power. As Ansgar Nunning reminds us, no one has ever been able to tell us where the implied author resides, except in ways that conflate the implied author with the "totality of meanings that can be inferred from a text" (Bal 18). 2. Since the implied author has no material being or textual identity, it is necessarily a reading effect, it is something that happens rather than something that is, and it happens in the wake of reading rather than prior to it. This axiom holds true no matter how one defines the implied author and no matter what one believes about the relationship between the implied author and the historical author. As Bal argues, the implied author is necessarily "the result of the investigation of the meaning of a text." In other words, "only after interpreting the text on the basis of a text description can the implied author be inferred and discussed" (18). This necessarily sequential--and thus dependent--position of the implied author distinguishes it dramatically from the historical author. Without a reader, there is no implied authorship. Even if the implied author is "contained" in the work, as Wolf Schmid recognizes, it is "not represented"; it has "only a virtual existence" (26) and therefore must be created from the work rather than the other way around. 3. The belief that a particular text is an intentional human discourse provides the only feasible rationale for deploying the concept of implied author. …

Mind = Mind + Social Mind?: A Response to Alan Palmer's Target Essay

Abstract: Let me begin by saying that many of Palmer's ideas strike me as inspirational and that I admire the verve with which he tackles his subject. However, rather than tick off areas of agreement, of which there are many, constructive criticism may be better served if l focus on reconstructing some of the questions and problems that I encountered in the course of reading his essay. Often, it seems, I get tripped up by ordinary language semantics. My first brief moment of doubt comes on page one, when Palmer asserts that "[a]ll of us, every day, know for a lot of the time what other people are thinking." In order to identify "other minds" in specific contexts, I will use some simple shorthand acronyms, say "OMs" for other minds in general, "ROMs" for real other minds, and "FOMs" for fictional other minds. I understand Palmer's aim is to explore social access to ROMs, then investigate how it is handled in FOMs, and then come back to ROMs, hoping to garner some interdisciplinary profit along the way. All of which is fine with me. Now, in my mental lexicon, know is a fairly powerful verb signifying a high degree of certainty. In fact, on a gradient of epistemic certainty, I tend to place it in a polar position, with three further terms (all mentioned at one point or another in Palmer's essay) tentatively completing the scale thus: not know Otherwise, yes, I am prepared to accept that ROMs become "visible" and that mind content can be guessed at--known, Palmer says--via behavioral indicators and other external evidence. In fact, there is some internal evidence, too, because I can personally attest to the fact that "You are not paying attention," when addressed to me, is usually perfectly true. I would not go as far as to say assumptions about ROMs are verifiable, but I am happy to admit they are subject to confirmation and disconfirmation. (Should behavioral indicators be treated as a semiotic system? I was beginning to wonder, but then decided to leave well enough alone.) Let's have a look at an example. You are sitting in an airplane, and you and the passenger seated next to you are observing a third passenger beginning to behave in a suspicious manner. Sure enough, your terrorism script springs into action, and you will readily assume that the passenger next to you shares your terrorism script and finds himself, just like you do, in the victim slot. Minimal body language, such as meaningful eye contact, may establish some mutual understanding prior to, perhaps, agreeing on a course of action. There's your "intermental encounter," Palmer will say. Fine; but note I refrained from phrasing any of this in terms of knowing--opting for the terrorism script you are pursuing an assumption that carries a failure clause as know does not; you are even taking chances as--"for all you know," you know--that person next to you might be either "one of them" or else a security guard pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Indeed your cognitive system would be well-advised to have these fall-back constructions "at the back of your mind," in case any of them should bubble up to the top. Now let us consider "knowing" OMs in other contexts, including possible and fictional scenarios. God knows our minds; no shilly-shallying assumptions or constructions needed here. …

Even "Internalist' Minds Are Social

Abstract: As a psychologist, I welcome Alan Palmer's thoughtful appraisal of the value of cognitive-psychological approaches to literary minds. Such accounts enrich literary studies by using ideas about real-world mental functioning to explain how minds operate on the pages of a literary text. Palmer's call for a renewed focus on social minds demonstrates the possibilities offered by such interdisciplinary approaches, and it comes from an author who is well versed in the psychological literature. My commentary will focus on some areas in which his theory might be extended to provide a slightly fuller account of the minds that are encountered in novels. The argument before us is premised on an opposition between internalist and externalist approaches to the novel. Texts which lend themselves to an externalist perspective are those which "describe intermental thought, which is joint, group, shared, or collective thought, as opposed to intramental, or private, individual thought." Novels are variable entities, of course, and certain texts lend themselves more readily to interpretation within one or other of these frameworks. Palmer's main point is that the operation of social minds has been neglected in the predominance of internalist literary criticism by its privileging of intramental over intermental thought. In making this point, he relies on an opposition between social and individual minds. Let's begin with two terms, thinking and thought, which appear frequently in the target essay. These terms are underspecified in psychology (e.g., Fernyhough, "Dialogic Thinking"), and conceptual difficulties follow from a lack of clarity about their extension. If we define thinking as everything that the conscious mind does, then we end up with a terra that is too broad to be of any real use. Much of what our brains do is underpinned by relatively autonomous, highly evolved cognitive sub-systems, many of whose operations take place without our awareness of them (see e.g. Carruthers "Cognitive Functions"). What we usually describe as "thinking," in contrast, is domain-general, conscious, active, coherent, and frequently goal-directed. I have argued that it is also fundamentally semiotic (Fernyhough, "Getting Vygotskian"; "Dialogic Thinking"), typically mediated by natural language (although other sign systems such as sign language can also be a medium for thinking). This view represents a take on the theories of the Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky (e.g., "Thinking and Speech"), who argued that our higher mental functions develop out of semiotically mediated social interactions which are gradually internalized to form verbal thinking. In my own formulation of these ideas (e.g., Fernyhough, "Getting Vygotskian"; "Dialogic Thinking"), I have emphasized how thinking consequently retains the dialogic quality of those primordial social exchanges. In some ways, this view of thinking (as verbal thought or inner speech) does not sit well with the internalist perspective that Palmer describes. Some of our mental activity is, as Palmer notes, fairly readily perceptible to others. But the Vygotskian view would hold that even prototypically internalist forms of mental activity, such as inner speech, are fundamentally social. Whether or not the reader will accept that all thinking involves inner speech (bearing in mind that I do not designate all conscious cognitive activity or intelligence as "thinking"), it remains the case that large parts of our conscious mental lives involve internal language (see e.g. Baars). Indeed, a bold statement of this view would hold that there is no such thing as non-social, purely intramental thought. Thinking is constitutionally intermental, because its dialogicality is guaranteed by its social origin. Palmer accepts this description of some mental activity, but he continues to rely on the intermental/intramental opposition in developing his argument. In my view, it is precisely because minds are (intramentally) social that certain forms of intermental thinking become possible. …

Point of View in First-Person Narratives: A Deictic Analysis of David Copperfield

Abstract: 1. Who Speaks Is Who Sees? In stylistics, first-person "homodiegetic" narratives are commonly held to be rather straightforward in terms of point of view--even more so if the narrator is the hero in his/her own story, and the narrative can thus be defined as "autodiegetic" (Genette 253). When that is the case--thus the argument goes--readers get to see the fictional events from a single point of view, that of the narrator/character: who speaks is who sees, and there is no legitimate escape from the single perspective (unless certain well-known narrative expedients--diaries, letters, etc.--are employed). In Style in Fiction, for instance, Leech and Short operate a distinction between "fictional" and "discoursal point of view" which is reminiscent of Genette's separation of "focalization" from "voice." But their exposition of these twin terms makes it clear that they are heavily dependent on one another, and that it is only in heterodiegetic narratives that the fictional point of view can be legitimately shifted: A fiction writer, although not compelled to take one person's point of view, can voluntarily limit his "omniscience' to those things which belong to one person's model of reality. He can also vary the fictional point of view, sometimes claiming authorial omniscience, sometimes giving us one character's version of events, sometimes that of another..., if events are recorded through the words or thoughts of a character, they are by that fact limited to what that character could reasonably be expected to know or infer. Discoursal point of view, that is, implies a parallel restriction of fictional point of view. (174-75) If the narration is entrusted to an external narrator, therefore, the story can even be told from "the point of view of an animal, or of a man on the point of death" (Leech and Short 174)--while if the narrator is a character within the story, what he/she can tell will be limited to what he/she sees/knows. A dozen years after Leech and Short's seminal book, Paul Simpson makes very similar assumptions on the connection between narrating voice and point of view: in his "modal grammar of point of view in narrative fiction" (which describes the combined effects of Leech and Short's "lictional" and "discoursal" points of view), Simpson distinguishes between "Category A" (homodiegetic) and "Category B" (heterodiegetic) narrations, and maintains that only the latter can be filtered through a "reflector." He further distinguishes between three "patterns of modality" (positive, negative, and neutral) which may be exhibited by the narrator/predicated upon the reflector: roughly, a positive shading reflects an epistemically confident and openly evaluative view of the world; a negative shading imbues the narrative with a general tone of uncertainty ("it seemed to me/him," "perhaps he thought I/he was wrong"); while if the general pattern of modality is neutral, "the narrator withholds subjective evaluations and tells the story through categorical assertions alone" (Simpson 60). Here are Simpson's two examples of "Category A" narration with positive shading (condensed), from Jane Eyre and Three Men in a Boat: It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action, and they will make it if they cannot find it.... Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties... It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or lean more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex. George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physicianary way of putting things. I agreed with George, and suggested that we should seek out some retired old-world spot, far from the madding crowd ... some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world . …

Response to Alan Palmer's "Social Minds"

Abstract: Palmer's distinction between intramental, or personal, and intermental, or shared thought is undeniably valid from both an intuitive and an empirical perspective. It is hard to even imagine a novel devoid of some conflict between individuals and the collective norms, values, or biases of their social context, and indeed all narrative contains some variation of this indispensable ingredient. Given narratology's lack of attention to the representation of intermental thoughts, it is to be hoped that Palmer's directive for a systematic investigation of this issue will be heeded. His analysis of the Middlemarch passages, which consists of the identification of textual features used to represent social minds, makes it clear that the narratological approach is the most appropriate for the specific research project he clearly identifies in the second part of his essay, namely the development of a "history of social minds." As a means to achieve that goal, he rightly argues, it is necessary to amass textual data regarding the strategies and features used to represent social minds in narrative fiction. Once enough evidence is collectcd, it might be possible to detect "historical patterns" in the way social minds are represented across time, and this in turn would advance our understanding of the evolution of the novel. The articulation of this particular goal and the role of narratology in accomplishing it are the most persuasively argued aspects of Palmer's essay. That narratology can be put at the service of narrative history is uncontroversial. Less clear, however, is the relationship between this historical goal and the very schematic cognitive framework he defends in the first part of his essay (which constitutes approximately two-thirds of the whole). Although this paper may not have been to establish a coherent conceptual framework, bur rather to make a case for the usefulness of cognitive theories for narratological purposes, there does seem to be a disconnect between the cognitive and the narratological in his argument. Throughout his long discussion of cognitive theories, Palmer drops many names of both cognitive scientists and literary scholars who make use of their research. Periodically, he very briefly alludes to a few general insights and ideas within the umbrella field of what he calls the "soft" cognitive sciences. What one gleans from this long discussion is that the main advantage of cognitive theories and approaches is their ability to shed light on the reading processes of real readers. He laments that "narrative theory has ... taken insufficient account of the practice of actual readers" states that "the constructions of the minds of fictional characters by narrators and readers are central to our understanding of how novels work ...," and declares that his aim is "to show how readers make sense of fiction, to explain the processes that we all engage in ..." In keeping with this goal, he offers several explanations about how readers construct elements of the story world; for example, how they process plot, how they how they bring real world knowledge to bear on the text, and how they are able to "follow the workings of characters' minds." Given the explicit narratological-historical goal stated towards the end of his essay, the first question that arises is how the cognitive goal of understanding readers' mental processes is related to the narratological goal of identifying textual features used to depict social minds. These appear to be two very different objectives, equally laudable and necessary, but not obviously compatible. In other words, the main problem that Palmer has not solved is precisely that of how to reconcile the narratological goal of analyzing textual features with the cognitive interest in reader constructions. This reconciliation between the narratological and the cognitive is possible, but not necessarily in a way that would serve the purpose of identifying historical patterns in the representation of social minds. …

"The Absence of Her Voice from That Concord": The Value of the Implied Author

Abstract: Hamilton College and a Utica coffee house have been co-sponsoring a series of community lectures under the rubric "Imagining America"--and two winters ago, I gave a talk on the critical reception of Lolita. To do so, I first had to walk briefly through my own hardly radical interpretation. Whatever Humbert's manipulations of Dolores and the narrative audience, Nabokov's fundamental purposes, I said, are profoundly ethical, as he teaches us to navigate around Humbert's postures and prose and to recognize the ugly truth he tries to hide. Nothing striking in my reading there--but during the question period, a philosopher chum, Celeste Friend (Nabokov couldn't have given her a better name), proposed another turn of the screw. The novel, she said, supplies pornographic pleasure for at least some readers--indeed, for more readers than will admit it. Suppose the moral veneer of the novel is just a front? Suppose that Nabokov not only knew that his high-art surface was offering a way for certain readers to indulge their illicit fantasies (much as the "serious" articles used to serve as a cover for intellectuals buying Plavboy), but also was laughing at those of us who tried to defend the novel as artistic and high-minded? Suppose Lolita is an elaborate display of smoke and mirrors aimed at tricking intellectuals into defending smut? I'll return to this question later--but first a little light theoretical preparation on the subject of implied authors. Granted, at first this isn't going to sound even like light theory, but please bear with me. I recently decided that I needed to buy a new turntable. Given the cost--and I'll tell you at the end of my essay what the top-rated Clearaudio turntable goes for--I turned to a few friends for advice. The typical response was a blank look and the question, "What do you need a turntable for?" And the answer, of course, is that if you live in a world of downloads, or even of compact discs, you don't need one. I raise this bit of personal shopping history because that response ("What do you need one for?") so closely resembles what we often hear from theorists who go after the implied author: "What do you need it for?" And the answer is, if you live in a world of certain kinds of intellectual inquiry, you probably don't. But people who live in those worlds will never be able to prove their larger point that it's unnecessary for the rest of us--at least, they'll never be able to prove it theoretically. Why? There are, I think, two overlapping reasons. First, there's the literary analog to Godel's incompleteness theorem: literature will always exceed the theories we develop to explain, evaluate, and interpret it. No theoretical schema can cover all the ground: there will always be something left out, some line of inquiry for which it will be inadequate. As a result, theoretical systems that call on Occam's razor to slice away the implied author are doomed from the start. At best, pure theorists can show that there are some coherent systems that don't require it; but they can't show that those coherent systems are sufficient to answer our questions, especially our future questions. I'm sorry to have to pick on David Herman here because I have collaborated productively with him and because I admire his work tremendously. But when, in "Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance," he tries to eliminate the implied author using Occam's razor (Herman 243)--and it's odd that anyone who relishes complicated taxonomies as much as Herman does would try to wield that particular weapon--he's superficially successlul. That is, he manages to provide a sensible program that doesn't include it--a coherent program that, moreover, manages to do the things he wants to do. But what does that prove? In the long run it's an inductive argument of the sort that can never clinch the case because it can't begin to represent all kinds of narrative or all the kinds of questions we might want to ask. It's not only, to use one of Herman's favorite words, defeasible; it's easily defeasible with just a single example of the sort I'll be providing later in my paper. …

The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment

Abstract: Mary Grover. The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping: Middlebrow Authorship and Cultural Embarrassment. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2009. 232 pages. One needs a certain kind of courage to write a monograph on an author whose name was a byword for mediocrity even in his lifetime. Best known as the author of Sorrell and Son (1925), Warwick Deeping (1877-1950) published some seventy novels, through which, Mary Grover asserts, "we can trace the development of an author's bitter contestation of the place in the cultural hierarchy to which these texts are being consigned" (15) - consigned both by fellow authors like Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene, but also by critics like Q. D. Leavis. Broadly, this is the foremost intention of Grover's study, which claims to be theoretically informed by Pierre Bourdieu's "analysis of the relation of middlebrow to highbrow culture" (15). Grover is quick to distance herself from some aspects of Bourdieu's ideas, however, at the same time that she mounts a sustained attack against Leavis, both of whom, she says, agree on three points: middlebrow writing "cheerfully and slavishly meets the expectations of the 'average reader'"; such readers are "happy to be addressed" in this way; and middlebrow fiction is all more or less identical (18). Working against these presumptions, Grover argues instead that Deeping was more interested in "construct [ing] new fantasies which addressed his own anxieties as much as those of a hypothetical 'average reader,'" and his work is noticeably varied, particularly in its shifting conceptions of "class, women, and Englishness" (18). In developing her argument about the consumers of middlebrow fiction, Grover contends that [m]ost self-identified highbrows or commentators on the highbrow imply that the highbrow is a member of a sensitive minority and the consumers of mass-produced cultural products an insensitive majority. Yet to understand the appeal of Deeping's novels, we need to entertain a notion of a "sensitive majority." (19) This is, unfortunately, something Grover never manages convincingly or comprehensively to do. Her interviews with thirteen "common readers" tend to affirm, if not the existence of an "insensitive majority," then certainly a majority who both lack the critical tools to evaluate what they consume (in terms of admittedly subjective criteria of literary artistry) and who respond in largely predictable ways to Deeping's work. That their responses are most often deployed as ornamental buttresses to her own argument rather than forming its foundation belies Graver's insistence that such responses are those that "really matter" (133) in this kind of inquiry. What makes Graver's book particularly curious is that she herself admits to being unsympathetic "to the subject positions" in Deeping's novels, at the same time that she disavows being "a dispassionate historian" (23). What this kind of study most needs is a dispassionate cultural critic who is also rigorously historical, or, failing that, a critic brazen enough to argue for the literary importance of Deeping' s body of work. Graver, however, is neither dispassionate, being too invested in championing the importance of the middlebrow, nor (understandably) is she willing to defend what she calls Deeping's "style" (23). She instead claims to be concerned with what she describes as Deeping's "tone and rhetoric" (ibid.), and what these aspects of his writing reveal "about the way that cultural hierarchies are set up, negotiated, and challenged" (ibid.). How she disentangles Deeping's "tone and rhetoric" from his "style" is, however, never entirely clear. Grover seems primarily concerned with trying to investigate how Deeping's class origins and shifting class position determine the nature of his fictional output. She begins by investigating the ways in which the middlebrow was and has been conceived and received in Britain and America from the first half of the twentieth century up to and including Oprah Winfrey's book club. …

Understanding Fictional Minds without Theory of Mind

Abstract: Original article can be found at : http://www.style.niu.edu/ Copyright Northern Illinois University

Writing Dreams to Good: Reading as Writing and Writing as Reading in Chaucer's Dream Visions

Abstract: John Gardner long ago made a connection between the "substance" of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and the poem's style, but his groundbreaking analysis bears widening to Chaucer's other dream visions, which, as Robert R Edwards puts it, have often been read as "represent[ing] a sustained reflection on the nature and devices of art" (xvi) Like the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls literally begins and ends with books, while the House of Fame, in spite of its more obscure conclusion, also brims with texts and questions of textuality, textual production, authorship, and--of course--"auctorite" Accordingly, a conception of the dream as text remains central to Chaucer's poetic program: as dreamer, the poet's persona acts as both writer and reader, and for all definitions of both To be sure, the trope of the interpretation or "reading" of dreams boasts a lengthy literary lineage extending from the Bible to Nick Bottom and beyond, a tradition to which the narrator of the Book of the Duchess alludes in his playful claim that no one can interpret his dream, not even Joseph or Macrobius: "Y trowe no man had the wyt / To konne wel my sweven rede" (278-9) Moreover, this use of the multivalent word "rede" hints at the word's importance in the dream visions, throughout which Chaucer draws on the multiple meanings of the verb: to advise, to interpret, and to recount, among others (1) Repeatedly foregrounding acts of reading, Chaucer sends his dreamer-narrators to embark upon a double journey: to seek meaning in old texts and to produce meaning in new ones At first, however, the narrator of the Parliament improperly reads the Somnium Scipionis, unable to find consolation for his "hevynesse" (89), and, without the help of his subsequent dream experience, neither can the Duchess narrator render a satisfactory reading of the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone In order to locate the consolation and meaning in old texts, so the dream visions insist, the reader must participate in a more active process than reading alone; for Chaucer's narrators, this process takes the form of an engagement with the texts in a dream space, while, for Chaucer himself as poet, the engagement with the texts occurs in producing texts of one's own, texts that in turn implicitly advise--"rede"--his readers to do the same Needless to say, none of these issues will be new to a reader even slightly acquainted with Chaucer's oeuvre; one of the most famous passages from the shorter poetry makes explicit the poet's enduring fascination with just this relationship between "olde feldes" and "newe corn," or rather "olde bokes" and "newe science" (PF 22-5) (2) Yet, for a poet as eager to produce rereadings in his own writing, at other times Chaucer remains decidedly ambivalent about the whole business: the questions of how and why to read and write become more complex when the author recognizes that he, too, must surrender control over his own rereadings to someone else's rereading Indeed, one might very well read the House of Fame as a 2200-line caveat to this lofty image of the fruitful clash between tradition and the individual talent I would argue, then, that the three dream visions in question together dramatize a variety of failures of reading, even as they finally maintain that some transactional process of rereading remains the only way to derive meaning from texts Of course, the danger in advancing this kind of argument lies in the natural impulse of the contemporary reader to apply modern conceptions of textual openness to Chaucer's medieval mentality; both Jill Mann and Rosemarie McGerr have written on this matter at length, acknowledging the risk and proposing methods of circumventing it (3) Like them, I do not wish to suggest that Chaucer has "anticipated" the postmodern condition, reader-response theory, or the entire legacy of twentieth-century Continental philosophy; rather, I find persuasive and useful Mann's argument that we can see in Chaucer's poetry what we might describe roughly as a "recognition of the dialogic creation of meaning" ("Chaucer and Atheism" 19) …

Six Ways Not to Save the Implied Author

Abstract: "[I]t is evident that in all written works there is an implied narrator or 'author' who 'intrudes' in making the necessary choices to get his story written in the way he desires" (Booth 164) Literary theorists may sometimes misconceive the provocative potential of their ideas Rarely, however, they are so notably off the mark in this regard as Wayne C Booth was when he first introduced the implied author concept in the above quoted passage from his 1952 essay "The S elf-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy" Far from being an "evident" component of "all written works," the implied author has given rise to a debate as intense and controversial as few concepts have in literary studies For almost five decades now, Booth's concept has been eliciting responses ranging from devastating criticism to passionate advocacy In what follows, we shall add a short statement to this long debate Our deliberations will draw on what seems to be the lesson to be learned from the implied author's history: it lies in the insight that making use of the concept reflects a wide range of deeply rooted scholarly aims and beliefs which are perfectly plausible when considered separately but which conflict with one another when combined in a single concept1 When dealing with concepts such as the implied author, it is therefore advisable to explicate them by identifying different key understandings and then examine the latter separately from one another For this reason, our discussion of the implied author presented in the following pages will not consist of a straightforward proposal for clarifying the concept Instead, we shall comment on the dominant types among the ways of modeling the implied author In principle, three competing suggestions are involved here, according to which Booth's concept should be taken as denoting either an aid to the description of empirical reception processes, a participant of communication, or a postulated subject behind the text, which in itself can be perceived in at least four different shapes Thus, we will have to deal with six ways to understand and - to let the cat out of the bag at once - not to save the implied author 1 The Implied Author as a Phenomenon of Reception We begin our survey by briefly considering the thesis that the concept should be understood as an aid to the description of empirical reception processes Such an understanding of the implied author is encountered in some of Booth's own remarks and in a significant number of contributions to the controversy surrounding the concept The thesis can be rejected straightaway as it ignores the differences between empirical research in reading processes and the nomatively based endeavour of literary interpretation: advocates of the view in question assume that actual reception processes should be taken as a point of reference for developing concepts to be used in the study of texts However plausible such an assumption might be, it does not determine how concepts like the implied author should be modelled in detail In other words, it is perfectly conceivable that the discourse of literary theory could come to see the implied author as superfluous, even if experiments in cognitive psychology were to show that readers of a text do form an image of its author Conversely, it is also conceivable that Booth's concept could be retained in the academic study of literature, even if empirical studies were to demonstrate that author-images are not formed in the process of reading literary texts 2 The Implied Author as a Participant in Communication The second interpretation of the concept that we will consider is the idea that the implied author should be understood as a sender in the process of literary communication The underlying idea here is that the communicative tasks in literature are shared between several parties; William Nelles has expressed this division pointedly when he says that "the historical author writes …

Socializing the Narrative Mind

Abstract: Why is the relationship between social and individual forms of mind so central to narrative fiction, indeed, to all narrative? The answer is as straightforward as it is compelling: It is central to our life--it is central to the social and cultural forms of life that constitute the human being in the world, a being that is essentially characterized by and through the use of that involute kind of language we call narrative. Not surprisingly, thus, the idea that human life and mind (or consciousness or thought) are inextricably individual and social has haunted not only literary and narrative studies bur most human sciences since their inception. To be sure, there is a gamut of approaches, from the more internally-focused psychology, philosophy, and psychiatry to the more externally-focused history, sociology, and anthropology--a range reiterated within each disciplinary matrix. Clifford Geertz, for one, has described the entire history of anthropology as a continuous struggle to understand the cultural nature of the mind by bringing, as it was variously put, individual and social, inner and outer, private and public, psychological and historical, experiential and behavioral into an "intelligible relationship"; and Jerome Bruner has sketched a similar history of psychology centering on the tension between the individual and the cultural--to name just two, albeit crucial, figures in the field. But there is another question that arises from cultural studies of the mind such as those by Geertz and Bruner, and here the answer is more complicated. This is whether it is not precisely this presumption--that what is problematic and needs to be determined is, in Geertz's terms, "some sort of bridging connection" between the world within the individual mind (or brain) and the world outside of it--which brings up the problem in the first place? In this view, the problem results from a categorical (or epistemological) distinction imposed upon a seamless real-world dynamic, a view that owes much to Wittgenstein's radical critique of the idea of a private language. Wittgenstein changed the terms of the game. Since his deconstruction of the assumption that an individual has privileged access to his or her private mind and the consequent socialization of meaning and language--as proposed by cultural-historical psychologist Lev Vygotsky--the "location of mind in the head and culture outside of it" no longer seems to be more than "obvious and incontrovertible common sense," to use again the words of Geertz. In fact, Geertz and many other cultural and linguistic anthropologists, discourse and conversation analysts, and cultural, discursive and narrative psychologists in the wake of Vygotsky and Bruner, have essentially contributed to carrying out the Wittgensteinian turn in our understanding of mind and culture. It is against this backdrop that I read Alan Palmer's forceful plea for taking seriously the mode of narrative he calls "intermental" and which he links to "social minds." It is through this mode, Palmer argues, that narrative--his focus is on novels but his arguments surely reach farther--gives shape to phenomena such as social discourses, collective thinking, and forms of consciousness that are constituted by more than one thinking, talking, and feeling individual. Solidly moored in philosophical and human-scientific traditions that conceive of the mind and the plethora of phenomena associated with it as not only confined to the individual brain but embodied and widely distributed in social practices and cultural artifacts, Palmer's Wittgensteinian turn in narrative studies and literary analysis is another convincing move within the new and impressively expanding field of post-classical narrative studies. This move is all the more significant in light of the long standing predominance of internalist and mentalist approaches to the understanding of literature; it joins other post-classical shifts that offer new views of the narrative mind. …

The Medium Is Also The Message: Narrating Media in Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama

Abstract: "You shouldn't be shocked by any of this, Victor," Bobby says. "This is expected. This was in the script. You shouldn't be surprised by any of this." --Glamorama 286 "They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said. --White Noise 13 Introduction Literary scholars have not paid much attention to Bret Easton Ellis' novels. When you look for more significant articles on Ellis' work not much shows up despite his novels' focus on interrelated issues of violence, terror and media. (1) This may be due to the fact that Ellis' authorship at some level has been devalued because he is considered more as a media phenomenon than as a serious and ambitious writer of novels. However, although Ellis' work and not just his authorship may be conceived as a media phenomenon, there is much more to it than just a provocative and spectacular media happening. His novels--and especially the novel Glamorama, which in this perspective is considered a peak in his authorship--are in fact innovative and provoking from a narratological as well as a mediatic perspective. From both perspectives Ellis' book presents remarkable results which will be presented and discussed below. When Alexander Laurence asked Ellis in an interview in 1994, "What kind of influence has the media had, growing up watching TV ... how has that informed the novel?" Ellis answered: The question is "How has television informed every book.'?" Media has informed all of us, no matter what artform we pursue, whether painters or musicians. TV has unconsciously, whether we want to admit it or not, shaped all of our visions to an inordinate degree. How? I don't know. I couldn't give you specifics. Is it good or bad? I don't know. I think it just is. (Laurence and Amerika) How television has informed and influenced a novel like Glamorama will be demonstrated in a short while, but this article also will try and clarify another peculiar thing highlighted in the interview. The interviewer, Laurence, states that there is "quite a bit of dialogue in what you write" to which Ellis reluctantly answers that "[e]verything I wrote is a monologue." Now, I am of course aware of Ellis' talent for performative self-fashioning in his media appearances, but I still think that the interview shows how Ellis' books are often misunderstood, not least from a narratological perspective. Glamorama is in fact a very astonishing and perhaps gloomy monologue from an unnamed first-person narrator with an idle identity. In their book Remediation. Understanding New Media Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin write: No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media. (15) This point obviously also applies to the book as media and following on from this the contents of this kind of media which for the purposes of the study in question is literature, especially the novel. It seems to me that research on the relationship between new media and narration has focused mostly on how new media has shaped our views of the book and, more specifically, the novel as a stand alone medium; and then also on how narratives find new avenues in new media.2 But less has been written on the influence media and new media has in the opposite direction, namely on the traditional novel and the way these novels are narrated; that is how narratives in the novel deals with and examines concepts like remediation and intermediality. In order to consider this point, I make some suggestions for a reading of certain ambiguities and strange events that are noticeable in the narration of Glamorama. …

Revisiting the Implied Author Yet Again: Why (Still) Bother?1

Abstract: Long-lived and hotly debated, arguments over the proper scope of the notion of an "implied author" - Wayne C. Booth's 1961 critical concept - have become "inextricably bound up with the epistemological and normative controversies about the place of the author in textual interpretation" (Kindt & Muller 2). A further debate has been prompted by conflicting views on the actual relevance of the concept for specific narratological analyses, especially following the development of a rhetorical line of inquiry into narrative construction and purpose. In this essay I shall attempt to bring together two prominent directions in recent ethical criticism - what R. Eaglestone has called the post-structuralist, Levinas-oriented and the rhetorical-and-narratological "wings" ("One and the Same" 602) of the contemporary ethical reflection on fiction - and determine whether their respective understanding of the idea of an implied author can indeed further their particular research aims as well as clarifying current confusion about the notion. By exploring some of the unacknowledged implications of the discourse on the implied author, I seek to intervene in debates about Booth's concept and make the argument that it remains fraught with 'technical' difficulties (exactly how is one to ascertain the semantic and/or ethical positioning of this authorial presence?) and proves, in the end, indefensible. After reviewing discussions of Booth's concept, I compare two readings of Yann Martel's Life of Pi in order to explore the relevance of the notion of an implied author for the cases when one wishes to arbitrate between contrasting interpretations of the same text. I then go on to argue that neither the rhetorical and narratological nor the Levinas-oriented ethical criticism has succeeded in rendering Booth's concept a precise and effective tool for literary interpretation. I conclude my analysis by considering the possibility that an alternative understanding of intentionality will enable practitioners of both lines of inquiry to pursue their research without needing to resort to the concept of an implied author. The Reader and His/Her Other While generally inclined to distance themselves from the variety of ethical criticism illustrated by neo-Aristotelian scholars such as Martha Nussbaum and Wayne C. Booth, proponents of a deconstruction and/or Levinas-inspired approach to the ethics of literature engage the legitimacy and relevance (or lack thereof) of the concept of an "implied author" mostly obliquely, by way of a larger critique of the neo-humanist project. If the post-structuralist investment in reading ethically is necessarily linked to a commitment to the "unreadability" of all texts, understood as their perpetual opening onto subsequent interpretations (Hillis Miller 41), then seeking to identify an implied author (indeed, the implied author2) of a literary work can surely only appear as a dubious endeavor to reduce the multiplicity of a text's meanings to the totalizing unity of authorial intention. Likewise, when confronted with the ethical imperative of recognizing and responding to the Other, which represents the well-known foundation of E. Levinas's philosophical project, any effort to reconstruct an implied author's presence 'behind' the literary work seems bound to fall under the suspicion (or actual indictment) of reducing the alterity of the text to the sameness of the interpreter's (un)conscious self -projection. In its more powerful articulation, the former critique points to the likelihood of an effective, though unacknowledged, replacement of the 'implied' authorial figure by the real author, who thus becomes the ultimate repository of a work's ethical and aesthetic commitments. One of R. Eaglestone's key arguments in the case he makes against M. Nussbaum's ethical criticism is that, despite theoretical claims to the contrary, Nussbaum relies heavily "on the presence of the author as a guide to interpretation" (Ethical Criticism 50). …

Multiple Implied Authors: How Many Can a Single Text Have?

Abstract: No matter how contested the concept of the implied author as such has been over the past half-century, scholars only rarely discuss the number of implied authors a literary text may evoke. While the single implied author is surely the default position, this essay will give its potential multiplicity, particularly the question of what determines their number, a more thorough examination than it has received in the past. The most common occasion for multiple implied authors probably is censorship or other social pressures. This may be seen in closeted gay texts, or 19th-century domestic novels by women written in a 'double-voiced' manner to "disguise subversive discourse" (Harris 20), so that the conventional values on the surface level of the text cover up the subversive values on its deeper level; they thus evoke two contradictory implied authors. Another important occasion for such multiplicity surely is collaboratively written fiction, where "different parts of multiple authors [do not always] get synthesized into a coherent implied author ... [but rather] remain unsynthesized [so that] the implied author is an incoherent figure" (Phelan, Living to Tell 46), "an irrevocably split personality" (Richardson, Unnatural Voices 118). This is particularly likely to happen in the so-called round-robin format, in which each author continues where the previous one left off and where authorial traces' demarcate the individual contributions. Thus, in contrast to Genette's claim that jointly authored texts never "betray the dualness of their authorial agents" (Narrative Discourse 147), readers are often confronted with incompatible narrative styles, inconsistent characters, or elements of different literary genres. A reader of, for instance, Naked Came the Manatee (1996), a crime novel by thirteen authors, complains that this novel "is a hobo stew of styles, with each writer leading us through silly plot moves and adding their own characters" (Seidman). While such a lack of unity and aesthetic fluidity may be analyzed as indicative of an 'incoherent' implied author, I would like to argue for the case of multiple implied authors where each one of them stands for a distinguishable set of values. With the term's notorious vagueness (cf. Kindt/Muller 8; Nunning 370; Herman/Vervaeck 17), it is particularly important to clarify what is meant here by the 'implied author.' Wayne C. Booth first introduces the category in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) as "an ideal, literary, created version of the real man" (75), "one of the author's most important effects [....] which will never be neutral toward all values" (71); in other words, the implied author is the sum of the values and norms expressed in the text. While Booth sees the implied author primarily as an effect of the real author's intentional value judgments and aesthetic choices which shape the text (cf. Phelan, Living 39), I consider the implied author primarily "a critical construct, inferred from the text" (Nelles 26; cf. Diengott 73; Shaw 301); thus it (2) is the effect of the interaction between text and reader and "exists ... as inferred and imagined.... This effect cannot be guaranteed, for the implied author is a matter of belief, existing only when and where readers construct it" (Lanser 155; cf. Herman/Vervaeck 18). Thus the only objectively verifiable factors here are the text's properties and the individual reader's historical situatedness. Although the term 'inferred author' would therefore be more suitable, I will continue to use the term 'implied author'--not only because it is well established, but also because it reflects the way most readers like to think of what they infer from the text, i.e. the implicit image of an author in the text, taken to be standing behind the scenes and to be responsible for its design and for the values and cultural norms it adheres to. (Prince 42: cf Schmid 39) My analysis slightly deviates from common practice of discussing the implied author when it largely ignores the narrator and takes the real reader into consideration. …

Toward a Rhetorical Perspective on Social Minds

Abstract: Alan Palmer's work on social minds marks a significant advance in narrative theory's project of describing and interpreting the representation of consciousness in the novel. Palmer persuasively demonstrates that combining the internalist and externalist approaches to consciousness representation leads us to recognize new dimensions of novels that we thought we already knew very well and, indeed, toward a revised understanding of the history of the novel. Furthermore, as Palmer suggests, his cognitively-based findings have implications for theorists working with other approaches. As one of those theorists, I would like to use my brief space to address what he calls "the need for a rhetorical and ethical perspective on analyses of social minds." (1) I divide the task into two parts: 1) a consideration of the relation between Palmer's cognitive approach and my rhetorical one; and 2) an explanation of how and why I propose to integrate Palmer's insights into my version of a rhetorical theory of narrative. I conceive of narrative as a multidimensional (cognitive, affective, ethical), purposeful communication of nontrivially-related events from a teller to an audience. More specifically, as the rhetorical definition has it, narrative is somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened. Palmer does not explicitly articulate his conception of narrative, bur at the core of his work is the assumption that narrative is the representation of human minds in interaction with the world and each other. These different conceptions are compatible--there is nothing in either that closes it off to the other--and, judging by Palmer's results, his is valid and productive (I must leave the assessment of the results of rhetorical theory to others). Indeed, I venture to say that Palmer's conception of narrative is what leads him to notice what others have missed and, thus, to his insights about social minds. Another way to indicate the compatibility of the approaches is to use Palmer's terms and concepts to describe the goals of rhetorical theory: narrative is a rich site for the formation of an intermental unit consisting of teller and audience or, more precisely, of the implied author and the flesh-and-blood readers who join the authorial audience (for rhetorical theory's take on audiences, see Rabinowitz). Furthermore, a narrative with a single author has an intramental origin but an intermental endpoint. Nevertheless, articulating the different underlying conceptions of narrative in each approach suggests that rhetorical theory puts more on its plate--it foregrounds not just the content of narrative but also tellers, audiences, effects, and purposes. Thus, for example, rhetorical theory is interested in both the ethics of the told (the ethical dimensions of the character-character relationships) and the ethics of the telling (the ethical dimensions of the author-narrator-audience relationships). There is one place in Palmer's essay where the compatibility of the models becomes a significant overlap. In clarifying the scope of his claims, Palmer says, I argue that this issue [social minds] looms large as a technique and as a subject matter in all of the novels that I discuss, but techniques and subject matters are parts of novels, not purposes of them. They are means rather than ends. What matters, ultimately, is the purpose to which a particular sort of consciousness representation is put. So my concern is with the purposes of presentations of social minds. In this passage Palmer begins chanting the Credo of Rhetorical Theory. But he never makes it all the way to the Credo's rousing Amen. Instead, for most of the essay, Palmer intones various refrains of his version of cognitive narratology. The compatibility of the approaches means that the two melodies can be brought into harmony, but my interest in the broader concerns of the rhetorical lead me to assign it the dominant role. …

"Up there with Black Holes and Darwin, almost bigger than dinosaurs"s: The mind and McEwan's enduring love

Abstract: "I thought of the look on Sando's face, how instantly he'd read us ... he'd sensed something different in the way we looked at him. It was hard to believe that we'd been so obvious. But it was true." --Tim Winton (1) Moments before the violent attempt on Joe Rose's life, his wife, Clarissa, articulates a prime concern of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (1997)--that we actually need narrative to make sense of experience because although literary narrative "isn't true ... it tells the truth" (169). This novel, through a representation of the complex phenomenon of mindreading, presents the unique power of literature to capture the intricate workings of the mind in a way that is denied to scientific discourse. McEwan uses the form of the novel as a space to explore the complex and largely unnoticed dynamics that exist when humans naturally engage with other minds. In such a way, Enduring Love is possibly indicative of a new literary trend, (2) and might be viewed as a new kind of novel representative of the 1990s--a period labelled the "Decade of the Brain" (Richardson 181)--when the study of consciousness became all the rage. Today, consciousness is still considered to be the "Holy Grail of science and philosophy" (Noe, Out of our Heads xi), and there is widespread public interest in scientific work on cognition generally. (3) In this context, it is interesting to consider how McEwan--who is deeply interested in science and what it can and cannot tell us about human nature--constructs this novel as a Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind, (4) a term used interchangeably with mindreading, is a concept used in philosophy of mind and cognitive science to describe human beings' commonsense, evolved, and largely unconscious ability to explain and predict the mental states--thoughts, feelings, intentions, desires and goals--of others based on their observable behaviour. McEwan uses the novel as a vehicle to elucidate psychological perplexities: the fundamental need, but also the essential difficulty, of understanding other people. McEwan's novel appeals to readers' minds because of its explicit focus on minds engaging with other minds; this challenges the reader to comprehend and judge fictional minds as we would in real life. We largely enjoy fictional experiences because they exercise our mindreading capabilities; we like to imagine and know what others are thinking. The more a novel engages with our mindreading capacities, the greater the appeal, claims Blakey Vermeule (52). She believes that novels "play on our need to fathom the deepest motivations of other people" (62). Enduring Love illustrates in a highly concentrated way our basic human desire to understand others. James Phelan believes "'narratives typically ask their readers to judge characters' judgments" ("Cognitive Narratology" 311), leading him to agree with Alan Palmer's assertion that when readers engage with and interpret literature, "we are all cognitivists" (310; Palmer "Attributions" 292). (5) Through the use of techniques such as characterization, the inclusion of paratexts, and scientific theories constructed through the popular appeal of a suspenseful discourse, this novel investigates the complex ways that minds interpret each other. McEwan's use of first-person narration and concentrated focalization invite the reader to occasionally, question the reliability of the narrator, thereby constructing a conspicuous perspectival slant to the discourse which challenges the reader to work hard. This "cognitively expensive" (Zunshine, Why We Read 103) discourse mode cleverly positions the reader to mirror the activity of interacting with minds and the necessary limitations both Joe and Clarissa experience as they struggle to make sense of Jed Parry's, as well as each other's, mind. This paper draws on an array of recent developments in the cognitive sciences to illuminate ideas about human consciousness in a text which so explicitly engages with scientific issues. …